A Decade On The Internet

Anybody up for Minesweeper?

I've had my own computer for nearly ten years now. This is a side-benefit of my father's undying fascination with technology, brought about by six years in the high-tech sector.

When I was a child and everybody else was still going to stores and buying their pornography in the form of magazines, my Dad signed us up for some crazy magic experiment called "The Intar-Net," which I at the age of seven though was basically just a box that made funny noises. When I was in middle school, Dad was one of the first people in Salem to jump onboard the broadband high-speed Internet train, ensuring that I could be shocked and horrified by the Internet twice as fast as all my friends. Dad has promised that once Apple gets off its shiny, ergonomically designed ass and signs a service contract with Verizon, we'll all get iPhones, and I feel certain that in a few years we'll be the first family on the block to have our own personal Skynet, and thus the first family to be murdered by Terminators once it becomes self aware.

My father's technological inclination means that he goes through a lot of computers - when he was at the peak of his game, he had seven computers in one room. That may sound bizarre to you, and it once did to me, but then I realized that when compared to all the other things you could have seven of in one room, computers are probably the least harmful. Imagine: A man with seven guns in one room. A woman with seven cats in one room. A family with seven children in one room. Thank you, but I'll take computers any day.

This benefitted me, because whenever Dad got a new computer he would dispose of the old one by giving it to me. My first computer, upon which I started writing Perfect Dark fan fiction in the summer of 1999, was more or less a box full of doorknobs by today's standards (and a box of slightly more impressive doorknobs by 1999 standards) that Dad gave to me when he bought himself a brand new Dell, all tricked out with Windows 2000 and a DVD drive. It wasn't much, but it was mine and mine alone, and it had lightning fast Internet access too - although those were the days when you could visit every website on the Internet in one afternoon if you took your time about it, so there really wasn't much need for speed. Back then there was plenty of Internet to go around.

In 7th grade, Dad got a new computer and I once again got his old one - this time around, through, his old computer was capable of running Half Life, and, more importantly, games like Team Fortress and Counter-Strike (back in the CS 1.5 glory days) which allowed me to postpone social development until well into high school while I spent my afternoons and weekends tearing up public servers and generally being the trash talking 13 year old that most people imagine when they think of playing video games online.

Just before going into high school, Dad got me a Dell Inspiron laptop, which was definitely cool by 2003 standards. It was big and clunky and it sucked power from a variety of cords that snaked down to a power strip behind my desk. It was also prohibitively large and heavy – and not just because my arms at the time were the equivalent of toothpicks held together with week-old Juicy Fruit. The carrying case had handles and a shoulder strap, both of which were padded to shield your hands/shoulder from injury because of the downright heaviness of the laptop. When, in my junior year of high school, Dad first got involved with Wi-Fi, the only way I could use it was by plugging a big wireless card into one of the computer’s USB ports. When I got my first MacBook, the notion of a laptop so light you could pick it up and take it with you anywhere with built in wireless capacity was pretty much intoxicating.

Having moved on to a new MacBook Pro in the wake of my old MacBook’s spontaneous hard drive failure a few months ago, I’m almost astounded at how much crap I’ve been dragging with me from one computer to the next over the years.

I’m currently in the process of packing up all my stuff to move back to Eugene, but this year I’ve decided to go through everything very carefully to make sure I only take what I need, in order to save on how much grief (and effort) I have to go through in the moving experience.* I’ve trimmed a lot of fat, and I’m only taking five boxes down, as opposed to the eight that I brought with me (however, one of those boxes is the box that I keep my XBox in, so I think that technically counts as like two boxes, and then maybe a third if you consider the XBox to be a box full of technology.) This happens a lot when I move – I take inventory of the stuff that I have and try my best to separate the bullshit from the non-bullshit.

*For the record, I’ve decided that while I do not need my set of big pink plastic boobs, I do need my Nerf pistol.

Not so with computers, though. In every computer change over the past decade, we’ve simply backed up everything on my hard drive and loaded it onto the new one, meaning that I’ve got files on here that I created when I was in 5th grade. Seeing as I only got serious about organizing my file folders two years into high school, most of my Documents folder looks like a robot threw up. I found a saved .jpg image of a Hot Wheels car (last modified in 1997 – clearly something I saved onto my first computer when it was still in Dad’s possession) tucked in among 8th grade science papers and a list of every stupid thing a girl in my 10th grade Spanish class said.

Trying to organize my hard drive is like walking through The Truman Capps Memorial Archives, which, true to my nature, have little to no organization and are, in the end, a waste of time.